Blogging The Boys
Joe Flacco started in 44 games in which his defense held the opponent to 10 points or less, the highest value among active quarterbacks. Would you be shocked to find out that Flacco is 44-0 in those games?
As a quarterback, there clearly is a benefit in playing for a team with a strong defense, as other NFL QBs and their W/L records will attest. Lamar Jackson, Flacco’s successor in Baltimore, is 27-0. Patrick Mahomes is 25-0 when the opponent scored 10 points or fewer, Matthew Stafford is 25-0, Sam Darnold is unbeaten at 14-0. In fact, of the 32 QBs penciled in as the starters for their teams by ourlads.com, 25 have never lost such a game. Of the rest, only one QB lost more than one game when the opponent was held to 10 points or fewer: Aaron Rodgers is 33-2 in those games.
The reality is, it’s very hard to lose a game where the opponent is held below 10 points. Yet if you were to read some of the headlines floating around after gameday – and if you were to give those headlines any credence – you could easily get the impression that it was the superstar QB all by himself who won those games.
The QB, whether you like it or not, is the only player on a football team who has a W/L record in his personal stats. But that doesn’t mean the QB is actually winning games for his team. Teams can win games with a strong defense, great special teams play, or a good ground game despite the QB, yet the QB will get the win on his record.
Which is why today we’ll take a more objective, stat-based look at the W/L records of NFL QBs and try to figure out which NFL quarterbacks are winning games for their teams, and which aren’t. To do that, we’ll look at ‘Wins Over Average’ (WOA) to understand which offenses, and by extension their QBs, contributed to wins for their teams.
Unlike the more established QB metrics like passer rating and ESPN’s QBR, WOA is a little off the beaten path, but can help us get a more complete, and perhaps more nuanced, picture of QB performance than the more established metrics alone can.
WOA was developed by Doug Drinen at Pro-football-reference.com (PFR). The underlying assumption for WOA is that it’s a lot easier for a QB to win games when the defense holds the opponent to 10 points than it would be if the defense gave up 30 points.
What WOA does is it calculates a QB’s winning percentage against a given bracket of points scored by the opponent (e.g., 0-10 points, 11-17 points etc.) and then compares how many games a given quarterback won versus how many games an NFL-average QB would have been expected to win.
To calculate WOA, we first need a baseline to determine what ‘NFL average performance’ looks like. For our purposes here we’ll use the 10-year league...
